Photo Credits: As Captain Morgan Leaves, Puerto Rico is Hoping to Keep the Rum Business Going With New Distillery

Near San Juan, Puerto Rico, a former pharmaceutical plant is being transformed into a rum distillery in hopes of helping the economy recover from the loss of Captain Morgan rum.

The new distillery is being developed by Club Caribe Distillers LLC, a local bottler of Coca-Cola, and agreements to produce rum in bulk for third parties has already been made. However, the company is also looking to break into the U.S. market with new products: a white rum called Club Caribe, a spiced rum called Black Roberts, and Ron Carlos, a dark rum.

“We see a great opportunity to increase the demand for local rum in the United States,” said Alberto Rivera, senior vice president and principal finance officer for Club Caribe.

When at full capacity, the plant should be able to produce 10 millions gallons of rum per year, though as part of the 20-year deal, only 2 million gallons of rum will be produced in the plant’s first year. It is scheduled to be opened in early 2012.

Club Caribe is expected to employ 25 people and invest $10 million in machinery and equipment in the former GlaxoSmithKline building. In the first year, it is believed the plant’s production will eventually generate $20 million in revenue for the island.

As Captain Morgan leaves the island, the U.S. commonwealth is expected to lose $140 million in. The rum producer is moving “next door”, to the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The rum industry has created 4,500 direct and indirect jobs. It also provides the government with around $400 million annually in rum rebate revenue.

The new distillery is located in the mountain town of Cidra, Puerto Rico.

The Spirit of a Privateer: Privateer International Opens Distillery

The Spirit of a Privateer: Privateer International Opens Distillery

Andrew Cabot opens rum distillery in Ipswich, MA

Ipswich, MA (Vocus/PRWEB) March 10, 2011

It was an economic instigator for the American Revolution. George Washington insisted on having it at his 1789 inauguration. Early in the history of the country, it was a ubiquitous campaigning tool. And prior to the Revolutionary War, the average American consumed three gallons of it per year.

Rum is the common thread running through these events in the early history of the American Republic. And the name Andrew Cabot (1750-1791) was associated with the manufacture of one of the earliest rums ever made on American shores. Cabot, along with his business partners, owned a rum distillery in Beverly Massachusetts, along the Atlantic Coast, just north of Boston. They smuggled their molasses into the country in defiance of British tariffs and laws. Once America declared independence from Britain, the economics of distilling rum changed, and Cabot divested his distillery to focus on increasing his interests in privateering.

Today, the namesake Andrew Cabot, six generations removed from the original, is carefully handcrafting fine American rum in Ipswich, MA.

Distilled from premium ingredients, in small batches, and with an obsessive attention to quality, Privateer Rum is a touchstone to an era when rum was America’s most prized spirit.

“There was an irresistibility and inevitability to this mission,” said Andrew. “And it quickly became clear to us that Privateer was positioned to fill an important gap in the ultra premium rum market.”

Bill Owens, President of the American Distilling Institute, concurs: “During the American Revolution, a war privateer and successful businessman from Massachusetts named Andrew Cabot was also busy distilling rum. Nearly three hundred years later, his descendant by the same name is using the original family approach to create his own craft-made rum. It is amazing to me that the great American spirit of ingenuity, freedom and independence can carry across so many generations, and nothing carries this tradition better than the art of distilling.”

Privateer’s award-winning master distiller Eric Watson said, “Privateer Rum will be like no other rum available in America today. Our proprietary approach combines the best of old and new world practices, resulting in levels of character and complexity that often are not found in ultra premium rums today.”

Privateer International, the name of the distillery, refers to the twenty-five privateer vessels that the original Cabot owned in whole or part during the American Revolution; these were fast and maneuverable vessels that hunted British merchant ships across the North Atlantic and from Canada to the Caribbean. Rum was the second entitlement of the sailors in this fleet, the first being their shares in the large prizes they captured from British merchants.

The rum that bears the Privateer label embodies the rebellious American spirit, and is currently available by the barrel at the Privateer Distillery, 28 Mitchell Road, Ipswich, MA.

You don’t hear about liquor brands getting involved in archaeology too often but the team of archaeologists has recovered six cannons from the site where “infamous privateer” Captain Henry Morgan’s ships wrecked in the 1600s is being rewarded with rum. Morgan is the namesake of Captain Morgan spiced rum. The ships crashed into a reef while carrying Morgan and a group of his men to raid Castillo de San Lorenzo el Real de Chagres, a fort that guarded the capital of Panama City. Morgan and his men were sailing up the river when his flagship, the Satisfaction, and multiple other vessels crashed into a reef and sank.

The Captain Morgan Rum Company has offered each adult member of the expedition team a barrel of their very own blend of rum, and plans to immortalize the team by renaming a section of the Captain Morgan distillery in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands in their honor.

“We cannot thank these brave archaeologists enough for recovering Captain Morgan’s lost cannons and returning them to us, as we all feared they were lost to the seven seas forever,” said a spokesperson for the Captain Morgan Society for the Preservation of Life, Love & Loot.

The company believes that there may be bottles of Morgan’s spiced rum that were aboard the Satisfaction and his other ships off the coast of Panama remain on the ocean’s floor waiting to be recovered. It has offered a reward as well as a role in a future advertising campaign to whoever who recovers them with the proviso that they do so responsibly and without damaging anything natural to environment.

Last Friday the Houston Museum of Natural Science’s Real Pirates: The Untold Story of the Whydah from Slave Ship to Pirate Ship opened. The exhibit tells the tale of the slave ship Whydah that was captured near the Bahamas by the dread pirate “Black Sam” Bellamy and his motley crew in 1717.

For two months the crew sailed the Whydah, plundering more than 50 ships, before setting sail for the captain’s Cape Cod home. Unfortunately, the ship met a violent storm, hit a sandbar and sank just miles off shore. Her plunder sunk to the bottom of the ocean as 102 pirate corpses floated on the waters, including Black Sam. Only two crew members survived.

Her wreckage was finally discovered by underwater explorer Barry Clifford in 1984 and it’s firmly established as the only authentic pirate shipwreck to date by the ship’s inscribed bell, and now the treasures have become a traveling museum blockbuster.

You really need to go.

There’s a lot of cool educational stuff and artifacts and some creepy Disney-esque pirate scenes like the one where a pirate’s leg is getting sawed off. Arrr, matey, it’s a great Halloween outing.

Oh, wait, this is a food column, right?

OK, so I’m looking at the stuff recovered from the wreckage and there are these pewter plates and big knives and I’m reading the text that says the pirates ate buckets of meat with ship’s biscuits “which might or might not be infected with weevils or maggots.” Ewwwww.

So all those old swashbuckling films where the captain is swilling rum and feasting on giant turkey legs at a table laden with food are fiction?

“There’s a lot of myth in what pirates ate,” says Merrianne Timko, a culinary historian who volunteers at the museum. Timko, a member of the Houston Society of Les Dames d’Escoffier, has been working with the museum staff to host Culinary Feasts since 2003. She’s currently working on Eat, Drink, and Plunder! A Pirate Feast, to be held October 31 on the tall ship Elissa docked at Galveston Island.

“For that, we’ll be doing some things a little more exotic, some Caribbean based foods,” she says. “I was going to do a traditional rum punch, there are still a few brands of rum that are like the 18th century ones, but they are very high proof. You know why? Because if the rum spilled on the gunpowder it would still ignite.

“But we don’t want guests driving back from Galveston under the influence of that.”

So the whole “yo, ho, ho and a bottle of rum” thing is accurate?

“Yes, there was a lot of rum, you might say,” she admits.

Apparently rum, from Jamaica, kept longer than beer onboard ships. Pirates, many of whom deserted from the Royal Navy, were swayed by the abundance of pirate rum. It was the pirates, Timko says, that discovered scurvy early on, and added limes, as well as bitters, molasses, eggs and chocolate, to their daily rum. All for medicinal purposes, of course.

The longer they were at sea, as rations and fresh water ran out, they would even mix flour with rum and eat the paste. Not so yum.

“A lot of time they would go without food,” Timko explains. “They would even cut up leather shoes into strips and eat them.”

“I saw one of those movies,” Timko says. “I thought the taverns were a little Hollywood.”

Timko has a passion for art, history and food. She’s spent months researching what real pirates from the so-called Golden Age (1700-1730) really ate.

When they were in ports in the Caribbean, they stocked up on supplies: dried grapes, plantains, cabbage (good source of vitamin C to combat scurvy), rice, coconuts, flamingos (please tell me no one eats those pretty pink birds anymore) and iguanas and their eggs. They would get whole pigs and brine them in vinegar and salt.

Without refrigeration, meats had to be salted in order to last any length of time. The beef was so salted and so hard that it often had other purposes.

“They would use it to patch holes in the ship,” Timko says, “it was that tough.”

Apparently, pirates didn’t have a very glamorous diet.

“A lot of stews, soups, something easy to prepare,” Timko says. “Almost like a slop. And the hardtack, the ship’s biscuits, was so hard they used it like utensils to scoop up the slop. Sometimes they just made little dough balls and dropped them into the stew. Of course the ship’s rats had probably been nibbling on them.”

Um, really getting squeamish here.

But what about all that pewter dishes and flatware?

“All of that was taken from looted ships, and probably reserved for officers,” she says. “Most of the pirates just ate with a knife. Not the best table manners.”

So this Halloween, even if you can’t score a ticket the museum’s culinary feast in Galveston, you can dress like Black Jack Sparrow and hoist a pint of rum, preferably with some lime and bitters added, and thank your lucky stars that we live a culinary city and don’t have to eat shoe leather. Or poor pink flamingos.